Before eBay removed my listing on a ‘technicality’, the current highest bid for it was $10,000 in only three days.

His text for the auction read:

Shortly after my Mohammad cartoon was announced as the winner of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s AFDI Draw Mohammad contest event and exhibition in Garland Texas, two jihadists came to try to murder the approximately 200 people who attended the event. They would have succeeded if not for a heroic, sharp-shooting policeman who blew their heads off before they could even enter the building.

The bodies of the gunmen outside the community centre that hosted the cartoon contest they ambushed.

The attack and event became an international news story and my life has never been the same since. Following the attack, I received more death threats than I ever had, even though I’ve been drawing Mohammad for years. But despite the danger, I want to continue drawing Mohammad. These days, there are fewer cartoonists willing to draw ‘He Who Must Not Be Drawn’, and, for me, that’s just more reason to do so, especially in a world where Free Speech is under siege from all sides.

What kind of world would it be if no one drew Mohammad? The Islamic world. I never want to live in that world, and drawing Mohammad every so often is how I personally keep that world at bay. My winning Mohammad cartoon explicitly spells out why I draw Mohammad in the first place. I never set out to draw Mohammad until the Danish cartoonists who did so were threatened with death over it. Though their Mohammad cartoons were blamed for inciting Islamic violence, in truth it’s Islamic violence which incites Mohammad cartoons.

My winning Mohammad cartoon led me to an event where I could have died if jihadists had their way, so it’s the most significant and most famous cartoon I’ve ever done – and might ever do. My cartoon became a symbol of Free Speech because drawing Mohammad has now become the most daring way of exercising one’s right to Free Speech in today’s world. Based on what some have written about it, it has become one of the most important pieces of art in recent memory.For example, Mark Steyn wrote the following about my winning Mohammad cartoon:‘It’s less about Mohammed than about the prohibition against drawing Mohammed – and the willingness of a small number of Muslims to murder those who do, and a far larger number of Muslims both enthusiastic and quiescent to support those who kill. Mr.Fawstin understands the remorseless logic of one-way multiculturalism – that it leads to the de facto universal acceptance of Islamic law.’

Own a famous piece of art that’s become a symbol of Free Speech, an image of which Freedom-lovers helped spread like wildfire on the Internet. Own a piece of original art that was at the heart of the first physical jihad attack on Free Speech in America. The image ended up on billboards, t-shirts, even coffee cups. It’s a newsworthy piece of art that 99.9% of the news media outside of Fox News never showed, and the original is now available for sale to the highest bidder.Hat tip: Trevor Blake

Is it just me, or does Pamela Geller look like the ghastly Andrea Minichiello Williams? She’s certainly every bit as deranged – apparently Obama has spent his presidency quietly engineering the establishment of a muslim caliphate in the Middle East. Yeah, right.http://freedomdefense.typepad.com/fdi/

Broga

“They would have succeeded if not for a heroic, sharp-shooting policeman who blew their heads off before they could even enter the building. ”
Is there a clue here about God/Allah’s wishes?

Pamela Geller is an embarrassment. At one point she was trying to whip up protest against halal butchering, without realizing that the practices she was clutching her pearls over are ALSO standard in kosher butchering.
Wilders has his nasty side too. But if free speech is to have meaning the two of them get to have it as well. I just wish a ‘draw Mo’ event could have started from a little higher moral ground.

Robster

Imagine submitting to religious nonsense! Never.

Dreyfus

What would be the reaction in say Bangladesh or Pakistan or Iran if christian hit squads hacked to death anyone who offended their christian sensitivities, or kill several hundred people at leisure event with suicide belts and indiscriminate firing of AK47 assault rifles, or were forced to withdraw from sale on eBay something christians chose to be offended by. What would be the reaction? We all know very well that the response would be global hysteria, shrieking mobs, wailing, gnashing of rotting and yellowing fangs, random atrocities on a huge scale, whipped up lynch mobs, unsavoury bloodlusting sexually repressed hoards of mindless morons with nothing nothing better to do than holler and scream and grope any woman stupid enough to venture outdoors, burning of embassies and hypocritical halfwits shrieking allah akbar ..peace be upon him and death to all kuffars …Well that what would happen … And the slime of islam relish any opportunity and indeed go out of their way to conjure them up in order to give their boring shitty lives some interest.

Brian Jordan

Does anyone know what was the “technicality” that was used to censor the eBay listing? Could it not have been rectified? The artist is reported as saying “eBay Removed my winning Mohammad cartoon listing, citing a ‘technicality’. They’ve confirmed it’s Fishy, effectively blocked its re-listing,”
I cannot discover a formal eBay meaning for “Fishy” – it could mean almost anything dodgy – which is hardly a “technical” term.

gedediah

If anyone had been killed other than the terrorists it would be in in very bad taste and I could understand eBay closing it down. Hopefully eBay will make their reasons known.

jay

“Hopefully eBay will make their reasons known.”
Fear.

jay

” apparently Obama has spent his presidency quietly engineering the establishment of a muslim caliphate in the Middle East. Yeah, right.”
Like Occam’s razor, incompetence is often a better explanation than malevolence. The truth is that Obama and Bush (both neocons, really) felt they could send in some troops, depose some dictators, and everything would be just fine….

Cali Ron

Don’t lay the war on Obama ‘s back. He inherited a war with a negotiated pullout date. The possibility of a win win or even a good outcome had already been lost. Middle Eastern Muslims are destined to spend another thousand years hating, arguing and killing each other regardless of the incompetent attempts of the US to manipulate the outcome.